


Beginnings

by Moirae (TigerDragon), TiaNadiezja



Series: The Doctor and the Constant [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-11
Updated: 2012-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-29 08:48:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/317969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/Moirae, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiaNadiezja/pseuds/TiaNadiezja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Amelia Pond was eight years old, she met a mad man with a blue box and decided to run away with him. When she was twenty, she met him again. The day she was married, she saved his life. The day she was widowed, he died.</p><p>She was twenty-nine and five days from thirty on the day she died.</p><p>It was on Pegasus VII, which was far too civilized a place to wind up dead, in the company of the Doctor, which was a little more predictable. She - he, before she was a she - had been saying for years that it was dangerous-to-fatal to stay with her. It was, Amy supposed, only natural that eventually the Doctor would turn out to be right.</p><p>It started with a mad scientist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> For an explanation of what happened to Rory, see "Running." We obviously don't own Doctor Who. Enjoy.

The slim, angry, red-headed human female was a terrible hostage. She complained constantly, mocked their plans mercilessly, and never seemed to be the least bit intimidated when they pointed their weapons at her. It was extremely unbecoming behavior.  “You will be silent!”  Thrax again pointed his rifle at her, glaring at her from above the high neck of his armor.  “I will not have my victory come to the sound of your incessant griping!”

“Well, since you’re not going to be having a victory anyway, that’s not something you have to worry about, now is it?” Leaning back carelessly in her restraints, the redhead took a small bag of jelly babies out of the pocket of her trenchcoat and popped one into her mouth. “Want one?”

“I do not have time for human confections!”  Thrax grumbled, turning to his men to give a last set of orders.  “Fan out.  Our enemy can arrive anywhere.  At the first sound of the blue box’s arrival, alert headquarters.”

“She’s not going to be happy with you, you know. She never is, when people start kidnapping her companions. What in the heavens possessed you to grab me, anyway?” She popped another of those infuriating confections into her mouth and sucked it lazily, watching him with green eyes that seemed to be enjoying his efforts. “If your plan was to conquer Fractis III without attracting her attention, you failed miserably. If your plan was to use me to make her careless so you can shoot her.... not so likely to work, either, but at least a solid B for effort.”

“Fractis III was a lure.  It did not work.  We settled on a more suitable lure.”  Thrax shook his head.  “My orders are to have the current incarnation of the Doctor killed.  I do not question them; I merely carry them out to the best of my ability.”

“Well, then, you get top marks for suicidal loyalty and a resounding fail for independent thought. She’s going to make you all wish you’d never been... born? Spawned? Where do you people come from, anyway?”

“We are cloned.  You have travelled with her this long... do you not even know that?”  Thrax tapped his radio.  “She’s here.  Soon, this battle will be done... and I will either succeed or die knowing I have done my duty.”

“Ah, well. Suit yourself. I’d seriously considering running, though, if it were me.” She took another jelly baby between those impishly curved lips, then crushed it between her teeth with a sigh. “She’s here.”

The first explosion came a mere minute later, the second two minutes after that.  Thrax’s eyes widened at the reports arriving in his radio.  “Alpha Squad has gone silent.  Beta Squad... Beta Squad reports some form of beast they can’t see.  She’s moving this way.”

The red-head pocketed her bag of sweet, and smiled seraphically. “Would you like to surrender now?”

“Sontarans do not surrender!”

“No, they don’t.”  The Doctor stepped out of the shadow of a falling military vehicle, and, with a wave of her screwdriver, Thrax’s gun let out a shower of sparks.  To the Sontaran’s credit, he kept his hands on it, though when he brought it to bear against the Doctor, it simply released a helpless whining sound before ceasing to function at all.  The Doctor then turned her screwdriver on the restraints, which clicked open.  “Are you hurt, Pond?”

“Spectacular.” The red-head bounced to her feet, smiling cheerfully, and stuck her hands in the pockets of her long brown coat. “I’ve never watched Sontarans get thrashed from the inside before. Very exciting. This one, in particular - wonderful company.”

“Very good.  Very, very good.”  The Doctor turned to Thrax.  “Because that means you get to leave.  You get to leave, and you get to tell your superiors what happened here.  You get to tell them what happens when people threaten me, when people threaten the people I love to try to get a response from me.  It works.  Every time, it works.  This?”  Another Sontaran plane fell from the sky, exploding in the middle of one of their infantry squads.  “This is a response.  This is the only response.  Tell them.”

“Oh, and tell them one more thing.” Amelia Pond - or the woman who looked like her, at least, even if those green eyes were older than any human’s had a right to be - smiled, leaned up to kiss Thrax’s cheek, and made a fearless soldier tremble. “Tell them that this is the lowest step of payback we know. It only gets worse from here. Now run along, and I won’t encourage her to make it an extended project.”

“Your messages will be delivered.”  With all the fearlessness of a good Sontaran soldier, and all the caution of a person who knew full well that he was defeated, Thrax fell back from the battlefield.

“That, my love, was exciting.” Pond leaned up and kissed the soft lips of the Doctor, winding her fingers into the sleek blond strands of her lover’s hair, and laughed gently. “Jelly baby?”

\-------------------------------------

When Amelia Pond was eight years old, she met a mad man with a blue box and decided to run away with him. When she was twenty, she met him again. The day she was married, she saved his life. The day she was widowed, he died.

She was twenty-nine and five days from thirty on the day she died.

It was on Pegasus VII, which was far too civilized a place to wind up dead, in the company of the Doctor, which was a little more predictable. She - he, before she was a she - had been saying for years that it was dangerous-to-fatal to stay with her. It was, Amy supposed, only natural that eventually the Doctor would turn out to be right. 

It started with a mad scientist.

\---------------------------

“If you’ll kindly keep your hands exactly where I can see them, Doctor, I won’t have to vaporize you. It would be a real pity for all that advanced intelligence and historical knowledge to go up in... heh... smoke.” Allison Chanty, who had enough degrees to make a decent sized bonfire and a face that would have been quite pretty if it weren’t animated by a wild, blazing hunger that ate all the humanity away from it, waved the plasma pistol in her right hand in the general direction of the Doctor and Amelia Pond while her left worked at the console built into the transparent pillar whose interior danced and flickered with golden light. “Just a few more minutes, and every last person on this planet will never know disease or hunger or age or pain again. I’m going to make them safe, you understand? Safe, forever.”

“Everyone, except the two-thirds of the human population of this planet that aren’t compatible with the nanogene treatment.  Except the entire nonhuman population, who will have their genetic codes ripped apart and die, horribly, when the machines are released.  Except the planet itself, when it is confronted with  _hungry humans who will never die_ .  Who will multiply and spread and never, ever, ever die, until this planet is just a writhing sea of... people!”

“That, Doctor, is what space travel is for. Plenty of room out there, isn’t there?” Allison’s lips peeled back over her teeth, and her eyes blazed. “Forever and forever and forever.”

“So you don’t plan on turning this planet into an endless sea of humans... you want to turn the  _universe_ into an endless sea of humans.  And you don’t think that someone might have a problem with that?”

“The nanogenes will protect us from whatever they try.” Allison stepped away from the console, waving her hands airily,  and then pointed the gun straight between the Doctor’s eyes.  “Ah, ah, ah. You’re trying to distract me. Keep those hands right where they are, Doctor.”

Amy Pond was moving. It was slow - terribly, terribly slow, because the human eye is drawn to motion and she did  not want to be shot - but she was moving. Because if the mad professor would just keep looking right at the Doctor long enough, she might be able to get to that console. Or something else. She hadn’t really thought that far ahead yet. Right now she was working on moving.

“Believe me, this is no distraction.  I’m trying to convince you not to do what you’re planning to do, because it is obviously both _ insane _ and  _genocidal_ , and, apart from this plan, you seem like a remarkably rational woman.”

“I am  _perfectly_ rational. I am going to go into history as the woman who ensured the future of humanity, Doctor - that’s surely worth a little mess, a little collateral damage.” The professor was almost close enough to touch the Doctor now, to brush that pistol against the delicate line of her cheekbones or the soft, wispy blond silk of her hair. “Surely you, of all people, can understand the desire to help one’s own race survive.”

Amy reached the edge of the console. Took a deep breath. Met the Doctor’s eyes.  _I love you._

The Doctor gave no indication with anything but her eyes of what she saw, but the slow sparkle there spoke of tears she would not be able to shed.

Allison’s eyes widened, and she started to turn a few fractions of a second after Amy began to move. That didn’t leave a great deal of time. Amy hit the controls for the containment field, then the emergency vent that blew into the room instead of into the general air supply, and then braced herself against the console.

The field hadn’t been meant to stop plasma discharges. It didn’t.

She managed not to scream.

“Amelia!”  The Doctor rushed toward the console, shoving the scientist roughly out of the way as she went.  She didn’t hear the hard, ugly crack when Allison slammed into the wall. She might not have cared if she had. “Amelia...”  She knelt, meeting her lover’s eyes.

“Doctor.” Amy’s breathing was ragged, her eyes full of tears and pain, but she managed a smile as she pressed her hand to the hot shock of the containment field. The pain barely registered. “Saved everyone, didn’t I?”

“You saved everyone, Amelia.”  The Doctor’s eyes filled with tears.  “The whole universe.”

“Good. Hate to think I didn’t go out on a high.” She shuddered and gasped, choking on burnt air, and the golden sparks of the nanogenes around her swirled and spun like fresh snow. “Pretty. Like stars. Like your eyes.”

“I love you, Amelia Pond.  I always have.”  The Doctor’s hand brushed against the field.

“Told you... I wouldn’t stop... running....” Amy’s eyes fluttered, and she swallowed the moan of pain. Made herself brave for her Doctor, one more time. “Not ever.”

“Pond...”  The Doctor closed her eyes for a long moment, then let them open again, meeting Amy’s gaze.  “You have been the best.”

“Knew... it. You’re a.... terrible... liar....” 

Her breath went out of her, one more time, and then she was still. The golden sparks settled over her like a delicate quicksilver blanket.

The Doctor gazed at her for a long moment before rising to her feet, moving to one of the secondary consoles to draw the nanogenes from the air within the field back into their containment cube.  She worked silently, her eyes lowered.

They refused to move. One at a time, drawn by invisible nets of force, they wrapped around each other like a chain and pulled down toward the thick layer of them already cloaking Amy’s body.

The Doctor paused, turning toward the containment field.   _Just this one time.  Just this one time, give me something..._

They flared, a second’s length star of golden light, and then they were gone. 

Amelia Pond coughed, choked, and rolled onto her back. Where the charred hole in her side had been, there was nothing but smooth skin and a few scant freckles.

“Amelia!”  The Doctor rushed to her, shutting off the field to pull her lover into her arms.  “Amelia.”

“Doctor.” Amy gasped into her shoulder, clinging to her, shuddering with something deeper than physical pain. “Doctor... I died. I died. You had better not be dead, or I swear I’m going to....”

“I’m not dead, Amelia... you’re alive.”  The Doctor pulled Amy’s head down, against her shoulder.  “The nanogenes... they brought you back.”

Someone screamed. It was high and wild and crazed, and it was not Amy’s voice. Without thinking, without even knowing what she was reacting to, Amy threw herself at the Doctor and knocked the smaller woman flat. 

Fire seared over Amy’s back, and she swore. Stood up, impossibly. Glared at Professor Allison Chanty with murder in her eyes. “Stop _ doing _ that!”

The scientist’s jaw dropped. She squeezed the trigger again. This time, it burned deep into Amy’s chest. It should have hurt more than it did... which is to say it should have hurt at all. It should have killed her.

It didn’t, and it didn’t. 

“Let me clarify,” she said with the part of her brain that wasn’t reeling with shock. “When I said stop doing that, I meant to  _stop shooting me_ . ”

Then she punched Allison in the face, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Apparently, it was. The professor dropped like a sack of meal.

The Doctor took the scientist’s gun, passing her screwdriver over it to short out the firing mechanism.  “There.  Now, even when she wakes up, she won’t shoot you.  How do you feel?”

“Alive. Fit.” She glanced down at herself, laughing because it seemed the only thing to do that wouldn’t end in raving madness. “Well fit, actually. I think they found that extra three pounds I’ve been looking to drop in the gym. Get shot and lose weight instantly … I’m going to be rich.”

The Doctor dropped the gun, pulling Amelia to her again.  “Alive...”

“Alive.” Amy could feel the subtle hum and pulse of something new under her skin, something alien and warm, and it should have frightened her. Being shot three times in four minutes should have frightened her. 

It didn’t. 

She leaned into her Doctor’s shoulder, smiled, and kissed the delicate arch of that slender neck. “Alive and well.”

\---------------------------


End file.
